Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to data retrieval systems, and more specifically to a method and system for indexing information, searching information and providing search results responsive to a query.
Description of the Related Art
The Internet has become one of the greatest information resources the world has ever known. Web sites throughout the world include a rich collection of text, images, audio, and video. However, finding specifically sought information among these web pages is not an easy task. Several search engines have been created to assist users in seeking information of interest. Most search engines feature searches of the text portion of web pages. These search engines typically include an index of web pages retrieved by its automated browsers (called robots or spiders). Thus, when a search engine receives a generated query including one or more keywords, the search engine locates pages that include at least one of the keywords and serves the user web pages that list the pages that include the one or more keywords received. The search results usually include a title and some information scraped from the web page. The user then selects the web pages to be displayed by clicking on the corresponding hyperlink. In many cases, many search results are servers and selection is not easy because the descriptive text shown in the search may not convey the full content of the corresponding page. There are also multimedia search services which locate documents containing or linking to multimedia files such as images in response to text search queries.
Examples of such search services include the AltaVista image search and the Lycos multimedia search for pictures. However, such services search only for documents containing images. Moreover those searches search only specialized image indexes. Therefore, there is a need for a search system wherein search results provide the user a better indication of the content of the web pages identified responsive to a received query.